The unsettling Jack Nicholson detail you missed in ‘The Shining’
The majority of Stanley Kubrick’s movies stand out for their unique take on specific genres, and in 1980, the legendary director made his first foray into horror with an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining, starring Jack Nicholson, Danny Lloyd, Shelley Duvall and Scatman Crothers.
However, the star of the show in The Shining is undoubtedly Nicholson, who plays Jack Torrence, a creatively blocked writer and recovering alcoholic who takes on a job as the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, moving there for the winter season with his family. Jack is disturbed by supernatural events, though, as is his son Danny, who discovers his psychic abilities. It doesn’t take long for Jack to descend into insanity and suddenly seeks out the murder of his wife, Wendy.
However, there’s an interesting detail surrounding Jack Nicholson’s character in Kubrick’s movie that audiences might not have realised, regardless of how many times they’ve watched it. The Kubrick scholar Filippo Ulivieri has worked tirelessly to bring such detail to light, and it’s a rather shocking one for sure.
It all surrounds the way Nicholson persistently looks at the camera throughout the film. Ulivieri notes, “I’m not talking about when he looks at the camera because he’s talking to someone else. I’m talking about all the times in which Jack Torrance looks at the camera, but there’s no one to look at.”
Such moments are admittedly brief, mere flashes in the action and dialogue, but for Ulivieri, they hold great significance, and considering they occur several times, it must be the case that they are all intentional rather than accidental. After all, Kubrick was a true master of film, so every detail in his movies do indeed have an intended meaning.
There is, of course, behind-the-scenes footage of Kubrick asking Nicholson to look into the camera in one specific moment, but the fact that Nicholson goes a few times extra must surely mean that something bigger, deeper and more sinister, considering the nature and narrative of the film, is at play.
Ulivieri’s suggestion is that “we are not safe from Jack’s fury. He knows where we are; he may come for us next”. In that light, it’s plausible that Kubrick is toying with the audience as characters in the film themselves and that perhaps the camera itself also serves as a narrative technique rather than as a mere production value.
Jack regularly sees the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel, and if he keeps looking at the camera, then that could well mean that it is also a ghost. But what lies beyond the camera? Well, simply the audience, who Jack is seemingly aware of throughout the film. “So the camera in The Shining must be… well, a ghost itself,” Ulivieri says. And if that is true, then are we also ghosts…?
Check out Ulivieri’s video essay below.
